The Tree of Sorting (Gen 2:9)
Into and Out of the Garden
9 … and so was the Tree of Sorting. ועץ הדעת טוב ורע
Once again we have a tree in addition to “every tree,” and once again it is “the” tree, as if we had seen it before or at least knew that we should expect to see it in this story. But unlike the Tree of Life, in some ways a standard feature of primordial myths about humanity, this is not a tree we have expected to see. The writer of this story, though, does seem to expect us to know what it is.
It will take me a while to explain why I have translated the name of this tree as the Tree of Sorting, except for the last 1% of it: Once I decided what this must mean, the word “sorting” popped into my head because of the Harry Potter “sorting hat.” In this case, of course, it is not the tree itself that sorts you (except perhaps in a manner of speaking); it is you that acquires the ability to sort things out when you eat from the tree.
Why didn’t I call it “the Tree of Knowledge,” as you perhaps expected me to do? The Hebrew, though full of “easy” vocabulary, is somewhat more difficult than that. There are two surprisingly difficult problems here:
דַּ֖עַת dá’at
ט֥וֹב וָרָֽע tov va-ra
Let’s take them one at a time. First, da’at. Exactly that same combination of letters and vowels could be knowing, the gerund of the verb to know (in Hebrew, the Qal infinitive construct of ידע), or the noun derived from that root that means knowledge.
Here are four translations of this phrase. Once I present them, I’ll explain how each of them is interpreting the grammar of the expression.
KJV: the tree of knowledge of good and evil
Alter: the tree of knowledge, good and evil.
Fox: Tree of the Knowing of Good and Evil.
NETS: the tree for knowing what is knowable of good and evil
The King James translation thinks da’at is a noun. But it also thinks da’at is in construct with tov va-ra, ‘knowledge of good and evil’. There are two grammatical problems with this:
Once we read HA-da’at in the absolute form, that should be the end of the construct chain.
A word should not be able to be in construct with a pair of words.
Robert Alter finesses that problem by translating “literally,” as if “good and evil” were just sitting after the noun, but does not explain what that is supposed to mean or why the text is written that way.
Everett Fox clearly reads da’at as the verb, but a verb should not be introduced by “the.”
The Greek transators could not make up their minds whether this was a verb or a noun, so they did something that is quite common in the Aramaic translations and translated the word da’at twice: “the tree for knowing [εἰδέναι] what is knowable [γνωστὸν].” This also more or less solves the other grammatical problem, by assuming that da’at is a verb when you need it to work like a verb and a noun when you need it to work like a noun. (Those who want a more technical discussion can look at GKC 115d.)
The next problem is tov va-ra. Sounds like it should mean “good and evil,” doesn’t it? And we know that good is on the table because in Genesis 1, everywhere God looked he saw something tov, something good. But I want to remind you how much our thinking is affected by the English words we choose. The four translations I’ve put up above all do say “good and evil,” but sometimes the opposite of good is bad. Why not here?
If I understand the thinking behind the choice of evil (I’m hearing it in my head in the voice of Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi), it is because this is a profoundly metaphysical story. “Bad” can happen in your kitchen, but if you are in the Garden of Eden, bad is somewhat bathetic. So let’s look at some possible understandings of this phrase, including how tov and ra are used in the Bible itself. Which of those meanings is the most appropriate here?
It can refer to various traits in a positive (tov) and negative (ra) sense (see 1 Sam 16:16).
• But what trait is being discussed here?
It refers to sexuality, just as “know” in the Bible can mean “to have sex” (we’ll discuss this further when we get to Gen 4:1).
• But Gen 3:5 and 3:22 tell us this knowledge is a divine quality. Even if you think, as many ancient peoples did, that the gods have sex too, it is certainly not a uniquely divine quality but one that even animals (and, as we now know, even plants) share. In any case, it is a Christian notion, not a Jewish one, that the earthlings did not have sex before eating from this tree.
It is a merism (extremes that point to the whole, like A to Z), that is, a tree that provides general knowledge.
• As much as I would like to eat a piece of fruit and suddenly be able to speak Italian or play the piano, this does not describe what we earthlings who have eaten from this tree are really like.
It is an idiom meaning “maturity.” Someone who is still a child cannot tell the difference between tov and ra (see Isa 7:15), and neither can someone in his second childhood (see 2 Sam 19:36).
• Metaphorically, at least, the earthlings may be children when they are created and adults after eating from the tree, but being embarrassed because you are nude is not the most mature sign of being a grownup.
It means “what it says,” that is, the ability to distinguish between good and bad.
• This is what I’ve taken it to mean — not “good and evil,” mind you; it is not that eating from this tree will teach them morality, but they will know how to differentiate every kind of “good and bad.” They will know how to make distinctions, how to think for themselves — how to sort things out. That’s how I’m understanding the phrase.
It’s worth remembering that Version 1 of the story focuses on the making of distinctions as deeply embedded in the nature of creation. If Version 2 is here to expand on Version 1, we might understand a story about humans gaining the ability to make distinctions as another example of God passing some of the work he originally did himself on to his creation.
We’ll talk much more about this when the story makes it appropriate. For now, Genesis 2 is turning to a quick and quite interesting geography lesson,